Sending for a Post Office Directory, in which towns with head offices—and therefore important—are printed in capitals, the Inspector laboriously ran his eye down the closely printed pages, searching for names in capital letters ending in ‘—von’. There were scores in ‘—ton’, some in ‘—don’, some in ‘—ven’, and ‘—van’, but he was amazed to find only two in ‘—von’—‘Carnarvon’ and ‘Stratford-on-Avon’. Of these, while ‘Carnarvon’, as he had already found, seemed too short, ‘Stratford-on-Avon’ was clearly a good deal too long. As he slowly pondered the matter, another idea occurred to him. ‘Devon’, he recollected, was rarely written alone, ‘North’ or ‘South’ was usually prefixed. To space out ‘North De—’ was the work of a moment. And then he felt more satisfied, for these letters seemed exactly to fill the required space. While he fully realised that the evidence was by no means conclusive—in fact, was but slightly removed from a guess—he thought the probabilities of the last word being ‘Devon’ were such, that it would be worth while investigating on the basis of this assumption before trying any of the other names. The next question therefore became, What, if any, places in Devon ended in ‘—rton’? He soon saw there were a number. Tiverton, Ashburton, Silverton, Merton, Halberton, Thorverton, Yelverton, Otterton, and Staverton he picked up at once from the atlas, and he felt sure there must be others, too small to be marked. His next step must therefore be to try if a small, elderly man with a grey beard, named William Douglas, lived in —Cottage, Tiverton, Ashburton, or one of the other places he had found. He took a sheet of paper and drafted a letter to the chief of the local police at each of these places, asking him to forward the information with regard to his own neighbourhood. Two days later he received a wire from Yelverton. ‘William Douglas lives at Myrtle Cottage near Yelverton Station.’ Tanner chuckled. He was getting on more rapidly than he could have hoped. CHAPTER XII. A Stern Chase When the 10.30 a.m. Riviera express pulled out of Paddington next morning, Inspector Tanner was occupying a corner seat in one of its first-class compartments. In his pocket was a warrant for the arrest of William Douglas, in case his investigations should indicate that such a step was desirable. He had determined that if his victim could not account satisfactorily for his actions on the night of the murder, or if his boots fitted the marks on the Cranshaw River bank, no other course would be possible.